Wednesday, July 8, 2026

Vanishing web content and internet services


There are frequent reminders that things on the internet aren’t permanent. Web content and online services are sometimes here today and gone tomorrow.
For instance, earlier this month TV Time, a tracking app for TV shows and movies, announced that it is shutting down on July 15. When that happens, all personal user data will be deleted.
TV Time has operated for more than a decade and built a dedicated community around episode tracking, watchlists and user ratings. But TV Time said the service is “no longer sustainable.” (See article by MacRumors.)
But all is not lost in this case. Rival services including JustWatch, Serializd and Trakt are offering migration tools for TV Time users to transfer their viewing history, watchlists and episode-tracking data to their platforms.
In May, ABC News purged the archives of respected data journalism website FiveThirtyEight and set up mass redirects to the generic politics section of ABCNews.com. The move took down thousands of articles dating back to the website’s founding in 2008.
ABC bought FiveThirtyEight, known for its data-driven analyses of elections, sports and other subjects, in April 2018.
The abrupt takedown drew heavy criticism from former editors, data journalists, and historians who viewed it as a massive blow to the preservation of public data and political history. (See article by the New York Times.)
A bigger data deletion occurred on Sept. 30, 2025, when blogging platform Typepad went dark after 22 years of service. Typepad announced its planned closure in late August 2025.
Users were given just over a month's notice to manually export decades worth of content before the servers were permanently deactivated and all unexported blogs were wiped out.
Also in May, search engine Ask.com quietly shut down after almost 30 years in operation. It launched in 1996 – a year before Google, which ultimately became the dominant search engine.
Ask.com “follows a spate of Y2K sites to the digital graveyard as AI bots take over the query space,” Sherwood News wrote.

Photos: Screenshots of TV Time and Ask.com.


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Monday, July 6, 2026

The Failed Promise of Digital Content: a recap, part 7


We were promised exhaustive libraries of digital content available anytime and anywhere, but those promises have come up short.
Since May 2009, I have written about the shortcomings of the internet and digital media when it comes to content – music, video, news articles, archived information, etc.
Here is an index of parts 101 to 115 of the series “The Failed Promise of Digital Content.”

Part 101: The end of movie discs is troubling for cinema fans
Part 102: The internet is awash in broken links
Part 103: Content on the internet has an expiration date
Part 104: Google search algorithm changes hurting small publishers
Part 105: Online content not safe from deletion
Part 106: Screw ‘netiquette’! Putting weblinks in blog posts is a waste of effort
Part 107: Why I unplugged my home landline phone
Part 108: Text message spam is annoying as hell
Part 109: Old newspapers need to be digitized
Part 110: AI summaries are the latest existential threat for news publishers
Part 111: Generative AI in the news business: Not to be trusted
Part 112: Free web platforms are preserving digital artifacts … for now
Part 113: Google search changes are hurting small news publishers
Part 114: AI-created fake photos of FIFA World Cup fans show a growing problem
Part 115: Fake movies competing with real movies for attention online

Photo: “Sorry, no internet today” by Marcelo Graciolli via Creative Commons.

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Saturday, July 4, 2026

The 'enshittification' of Google’s Blogger


When I started blogging as a pastime in late 2008, Google’s Blogger was a great choice of platforms. It was free and easy to use and had the financial backing of an internet powerhouse. I wasn’t worried about it disappearing like other platforms.
Also, in the first five years of blogging, I received annual checks of more than $100 each just for allowing advertisements on my Tech-media-tainment blog. Then there was a change in Google’s algorithms and traffic dried up.
Last week I removed the ads from Tech-media-tainment and canceled my revenue-sharing Google AdSense account. The reason was that Google kept increasing the ad counts on the page and the ads became increasingly intrusive.
Tech-media-tainment started with a static banner ad at the top of the page and another between the first and second articles. But that eventually changed to pop-up ads and advertisements on the top and left and right. The main ad forced users to manually close it like a window shade to read the article.
The last straw was when Google added contextual ads in the description of my blog: “Entertainment, pop culture, personal technology and media.” Google said it was an experiment, but I had no way to turn it off. It was ugly and confusing.
The changes at Google’s Blogger fit the definition of “enshittification,” where a service starts out user-friendly but becomes worse as the company increasingly tries to monetize it.
I hope this isn’t the beginning of the end for Blogger. I’d hate to have to export all my work to another service like WordPress or Substack, because I don’t know what to expect there. Plus, that would be a ton of work and create a lot of dead links.
Even Google Gemini admits that Blogger is rarely updated anymore, calling it “an absolute relic of the early 2000s web.”
“There is always a tiny, looming fear that Google might ‘sunset’ it one day like they do with many legacy projects,” Gemini said. Does Google’s AI chatbot know something Google hasn’t said yet?

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Friday, July 3, 2026

Hippos, orcas and other animals attacking movie protagonists


Sharks aren’t the only killer animals on the prowl on movie screens this year. There are also killer hippos, orcas, spiders and snakes at the cinema.
“Hungry,” released in late June, features a rampaging, killer hippopotamus in the Louisiana bayou. Reviews from critics have been mixed, but these types of movies are made for fans of the genre not high-brow snobs.
Coming this fall is the killer orca movie “Black Tides,” starring John Travolta. It is directed by Renny Harlin, who also directed the recent shark-attack movie “Deep Water.”
Due out on Oct. 2 is “Beware Boiúna,” which is about a legendary killer snake in the Amazon rainforest. In Brazilian folklore, the Boiúna (which translates to "Black Snake") is a massive, menacing river serpent.
Also due in October is the movie “Whalefall,” starring Josh Brolin. It involves a scuba diver swallowed by an 80-foot, 60-ton sperm whale.
October will also see the release of “Crawlers.” Here’s the synopsis: Quarantined residents of an infested apartment complex find themselves in a fight for their lives against deadly, venomous spiders rapidly spreading throughout the building.

Related article:

Shark-attack movies are getting more ridiculous (June 30, 2026)

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Tuesday, June 30, 2026

Shark-attack movies are getting more ridiculous


It wouldn’t be summer cinema without shark-attack movies. But some of the new movies are playing more for laughs than scares.
“Water Park Shark” is a B-movie horror comedy from Anthony C. Ferrante – the director behind the famously ridiculous “Sharknado” franchise. The plot involves great white sharks breaching a water park in Cape Cod, Mass. It’s due out on July 3 on Amazon Prime Video.
“Sorority Shark Attack” reportedly is set for a streaming video release later this year. It features Robert Carradine (“Revenge of the Nerds”) in one of his final film roles before his death in February.
“Thrash,” which premiered April 10 on Netflix, also generated as many laughs as scares. The plot has a pack of hungry bull sharks invading a flooded coastal town in South Carolina during a hurricane. To make matters worse, the initial storm surge breaks open a massive commercial tanker truck carrying animal blood.
Here’s the plot of “Chum,” released on June 5: “A newlywed couple joins friends on a Mediterranean yacht excursion, only to find themselves caught between a predatory shark and a psychopathic killer in their midst – transforming a sun-drenched escape into a fight for survival.”
“Chum,” starring Alice Eve, received terrible reviews.
Another recent shark-attack movie was “Deep Water,” starring Aaron Eckhart. It involves an international flight that crashes in the Pacific Ocean, and the passengers and crew must work to survive a group of circling sharks. Released on May 1, the film received mildly positive reviews from critics.
Coming soon are “The Devil’s Mouth” and “The Bay,” both of which feature sharks attacking tourists in Thailand.
“The Devil’s Mouth” stars Kathryn Newton and Lana Condor and is set for release on Amazon Prime Video on July 29.
“The Bay” stars Francesca Eastwood and is due for release on July 17 in select theaters and on digital video on demand.
Next year will seen the release on Netflix of “Under Paris 2,” the sequel to “Under Paris” (2024), which featured a giant shark in the Seine. Yeah, totally believable.

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Monday, June 29, 2026

AI-generated fake movie stills infuriate


Just as frustrating as the proliferation online of AI-generated fake movie posters are social media posts with photos purporting to be from new movies. They usually come with teases to the effect of “You’ve got to see this movie. It’s incredible.”
But they offer no details. No title. No release information. Nothing. It’s all one big infuriating tease.
Some photos are obviously fake. One still showed a female sniper with two right hands. (See above.) Generative AI now tends to make dumb mistakes like that. But the technology is improving, and it will get harder to tell the truth from the lies.
What follows are some recent phony movie stills posted on X. Be sure to mute those X users who do this so they don’t show up in your feed again.





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Sunday, June 28, 2026

Fake movies competing with real movies for attention online


I used to rely on suggestions from social media for new movies to watch, but lately X, formerly known as Twitter, has been awash in posts promoting fake movies using AI-created posters and photos.
At first glance, some look compelling. But you soon realize that you’ve been duped. Others with A-list actors are obvious fakes.
The situation is as bad as the numerous online photos of sexy women at FIFA games that turned out to be AI frauds.
Some of these phony movies are fan fiction or wishful thinking as far as casting. But the people who post them don’t usually say that and present them as if they are real. They likely post them to generate user engagement through clickbait.
The worst offender is an account called Movies House (@luther_181). I have muted them and suggest you do too. In fact, I mute all accounts that post this garbage.

Photo: Fake movie poster for “Vis A Vis” with images of actors Jason Statham, Dwyane Johnson and Angelina Jolie.











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